“I wish I could draw like you, for I like lines better than words and colours more than sentences”.

– Oscar Wilde to W Graham Robertson in 1888

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of imprisonment with hard labour for “acts of gross indecency with another male person”. He spent most of those two years in Reading Prison. On his release, he entered a self-imposed exile in France. Broken in health, and declared bankrupt, he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a love-poem and an impassioned plea for prison reform. It was his last work.

For our new exhibition, we are very fortunate to have the opportunity to show a selection of illustrated editions of the Ballad lent from the collection of Michael Seeney. The editions on show include the first published illustrated edition of the Ballad and recent editions produced by small presses such as Reading’s Two Rivers Press. This exhibition has been organised by the University’s Department of English in collaboration with Michael Seeney, and was on show at the Berkshire Record Office last year.

The following text is an abridged version of an introduction to the exhibition by Michael Seeney examining the history of the writing, publication and illustration of the Ballad. A leaflet which features the full version of the introduction is available free of charge to visitors to the exhibition.

“Oscar Wilde was released from prison in May 1897. The same night he and his friend More Adey took the night boat from Newhaven to Dieppe. The British in Dieppe were, with few exceptions, unfriendly and, before the end of the month, Wilde moved a few miles along the coast to Berneval-sur-Mer. There he rented a small house – the Chalet Bourgeat. Here he intended writing three essays, two of which would describe the prison system. They were never written, but in June he began writing his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In the words of a later High Court judge, “He owed his inspiration to Her Majesty’s Government”.

Wilde’s intention was to write a poem which combined propaganda for prison reform with a Romanticism in part drawn from Coleridge. In doing so he claimed to “out-Kipling Henley”. Wilde’s poem accurately reflects the conditions in prison. The central narrative of the poem is the execution by hanging of Charles Thomas Wooldridge at Reading on 7 July 1896.

Wilde sent an almost complete manuscript to the publisher Leonard Smithers who approached Aubrey Beardsley with a proposal for an illustrated edition. Beardsley expressed great interest and, as Smithers told Wilde, “I showed it to Aubrey and he seemed to be much struck by it. He promised at once to do a frontispiece for it – in a manner which immediately convinced me that he will never do it.” Wilde thought that if Beardsley “will do it, it will be a great thing” but, if he would not give a commitment, Smithers should “try some of the jeunes Belges – Khnoppf for example.” In the same letter Wilde spelled out in detail his ideas for illustrations and decorations:

I want something curious – a design of Death and Sin walking hand in hand, very severe, and mediaeval. Also, for the divisions between the separate parts of each canto of the ballad, I want not asterisks, nor lines, but a little design of three flowers or some decorative motive, simple and severe: then there are five or six initial letters – H: F: I: I: T.

In December Wilde made clear that for illustrations he was looking for something non-representational; in writing to Smithers about his American agent, Elizabeth Marbury, he said that:

Her suggestion of illustration is of course out of the question. Pray tell her from me that it would entirely spoil any beauty the poem has, and not add anything to its psychological revelations. The horror of prison-life is the contrast between the grotesqueness of one’s aspect and the tragedy in one’s soul. Illustrations would emphasise the former, and conceal the latter. Of course I refer to realistic illustration.

When the book was published on 13 February 1898 there were no illustrations; and instead of Wilde’s “three flowers” there were single standard printers’ fleurons.

Smithers and Wilde had agreed that the author’s name would not appear on the book, and that the title page would say it was by C.3.3. (the number of Wilde’s cell in Reading Gaol). However, the authorship was an open secret; on the day of publication Reynold’s Newspaper carried news of the book under the heading “New Poem by Oscar Wilde” and printed eighteen verses.

The first edition consisted of 800 copies, with a further 30 printed on Japanese vellum. The entire edition sold out within a few days. A second edition followed and then, at Wilde’s request, a third edition, limited to 99 copies signed by Wilde (thus removing any last doubts about its authorship) was issued in March. Another four editions were issued bringing the total number of copies in circulation to over 5000, meaning it was commercially by far the most successful of his works. Having said to Wilde that he thought it time Wilde “owned” the Ballad, Smithers added Wilde’s name to the title page of the seventh edition following “C.3.3.”. This was the last edition published during Wilde’s lifetime, although Smithers continued to produce what were effectively pirated editions for some years after Wilde’s death in November 1900.

Although the Ballad was issued by a number of publishers abroad, there was no attempt to illustrate the book until 1907. The first fully illustrated edition appeared in New York, illustrated by Latimer J Wilson.

The first European illustrated edition appeared in German in 1916 and was followed by French, Czech and Hungarian editions. Several fully illustrated editions appeared in America in the late twenties and thirties. There was no illustrated edition published in Britain until 1948. Arthur Wragg, the illustrator, was, as far as is known, the only illustrator up to that time who had actually visited Reading Gaol. Britain still lags behind in the number of illustrated editions, although in recent years there have been notable sets of illustrations by Garrick Palmer, Peter Forster and Peter Hay, as well as the abstract illustrations of Jeremy Mason.

In accordance with Wilde’s views expressed to Smithers, each of the illustrated editions examined has been interpretive rather than realistic. We cannot know what Wilde envisaged as an ideal illustration but he would certainly have been delighted to see that so many artists have taken the poem as an inspiration”.

We are also delighted to announce that to coincide with the exhibition, Michael Seeney will give a talk about building a collection on Oscar Wilde. In addition to books, Michael’s collection also extends to anything related to Wilde, from letters and autograph material to mugs and t-shirts. As well as talking about his own collection, Michael will also look at important collectors of the past and what has become of their collections, and the role of private collectors in academic research.

The talk, entitled Collecting Oscar Wilde: Public and Private Good, will take place at The Museum of English Rural Life on Thursday 30 May 2019, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm. The event is free but booking is advisable – you can book tickets here.
This event takes place during our monthly Late Opening Night, so the museum, shop, cafe, garden and reading room are all open until 9pm.

The Department of Typography & Graphic Communications’ teaching sessions always involve a swath of fascinating material from early medical texts to astronomy. One day I was setting up a large volume on some foam rests for students to peruse. Upon opening it up, I saw an endpaper quite unlike anything I had seen before. It had a much softer, lighter appearance than the richer, denser-looking examples found elsewhere within our collections.

The book in which these endpapers reside is Baskerville’s celebrated edition of The Holy Bible. This volume is part of the Overstone Library, a collection which has been held by the university for 99 years, having been bequeathed it by Lady Wantage. She was the daughter of the 1st Baron Overstone, who bought political economist John Ramsay McCulloch’s library after his death in 1864. Being the private library of a gentleman, many of the bindings are very fine. McCulloch, for his part, wrote in his preface to his library’s catalogue that he “acknowledge[d] myself to be an ardent admirer of well-printed handsome volumes […] I also confess to such a folly, if such it be, of being no less an admirer of well-bound than of well-printed books”. It is clear that not all of these bindings were executed during their lifetimes.

In his introduction to Anne Chambers’ The principal antique patterns of marbled paper, Bernard Middleton relates that marbling began to develop in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, which is the period Baskerville was active in. Diana Patterson relates the tale of his involvement in a competition for a premium offered by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which is now the Royal Society of Arts.

McCulloch describes the volume as being bound in “old red morocco, gilt leaves ; a magnificent book”. Baron Overstone describes it as “Baskerville’s beautiful edition […] old red morocco extra, richly tooled, gilt edges”. In the latter catalogue there is a shelfmark written in pencil in the right hand margin: 11. A, and a note: “Marks. 1930” and additionally “£12 calf”. The shelfmark can be found in the book, but it is crossed out, as the book now sits at Overstone–Shelf 32J/04, and is deemed “Large”.

Both the catalogues and bookplates reveal this was a book Overstone bought from McCulloch. In Contributions towards a dictionary of English book-collectors, James Bonar writes that “the collection is not now traceable”. An inscription on the rear of the endpaper reads: 3/7. 38 453. This could be an acquisition date, or auction lot number. I have not been able to gather any more details on former owners prior to McCulloch.

One has to agree with McCulloch – it is a magnificent book. The binding is unsigned, but not without clues. One, on the exterior, is the leather label with the title on it in gilt. It certainly looks akin to Baskerville’s type. Philip Gaskell, writing of another binding, writes “what links it with Baskerville is the leather label on the spine… apparently with sorts of his own Double Pica roman and italic caps”. Gerry Leonidas, of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communiation, told me that he is not so sure about the lettering seen above as it “looks a bit heavy and with different proportions for the bowls of the B. The E and L have much more curved strokes leading into the serifs.” Another, also on the exterior, is the presence of an acorn tool, which according to Aurelie Martin in “The ‘Baskerville bindings'” is a finishing tool found on some of the 31 volumes she surveyed.

The third clue, when one opens the book, is the endpaper. Gaskell, in his Baskerville bibliography, describes an example of it as “rather striking […] marbled to represent blended washes of water colour”. Intriguingly, if one looks closely, you can see that two pieces of paper have been stuck together before being marbled. Diana Patterson asserts Baskerville did marble at least a ream of paper, which suggests there is more out there to be found.

This certainly is a very exciting discovery for us. Known examples of this marbled paper reside in Birmingham, the British Library, Harvard, and in private collections.

This is by no means the only example of this marbled paper we hold in our collections, but it is far and away the best. The second is in a rebound copy of Paradise Lost from the Printing Collection which only possesses its front endpaper.